More than Roy Wood, a gravity-defying coiffure undoubtedly brought on by fanatical Uriah Heep fandom - those were the air/hair guitar '70's days. I was more into Rory Gallagher myself...

A dark hair horse lurking at the back on the right is the very tall Andrew Lane, son of the art master of the day, uncommonly civilised people.

Bob Hailey is the other tutor in the pic, even made studying Latin seem fun, a truly Christian gentleman who single-handedly established footie at CH in the face of the indifference of the traditionalists.

And there are a couple of ghosts....John Dunkely, not present due to being the oldest in the year and sent up early. Geniality personified.

And the hyperbright and flamboyant house problem child Stuart Pryle, sent up early that summer.

I remember John ´Dud` Dunkley very well, he took me to one of my first footy matches, at Highbury to see his beloved Arsenal.
Unfortunately Stuart Pryle committed suicide at the tender age of 30. Very sad.

I read that he hadn't made it through the '80s - you wonder what drove him to perform the ultimate gesture of self-defeat.

Always academically at ease, he had one of those superheated personalities that went beyond standard issue premonitional-but-petulant youth. I suspect that the accompanying tension, which could potentially have been sublimated into strong evolutionary vitality, became unbearable over time. I can't help questioning whether the boarding-school experience did him a great deal of kindness on that score.

I sometimes think that there's a tacit but widely-held consensus that our newly-acquired habits, once seen as vices, are the flower of our virtue and therefore in some way excusable, forgivable, unpunishable, a sort of 'happiness' found in the knowledge that a few predestined individuals will carry the can, the burden of shame if you like, for everyone. Stuart might or might not have been one of those individuals, I'm not qualified to comment.

But I do know from experience that the last thing to be sacrificed by some people - though it ought to be the first - is their own prejudice and that others are very sensitive to that fact.
I also know that life is not worth the wasting of it. But the tragedy is that some people do exactly that. RIP